Alloula - Colonial Harem

Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics

Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception

Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics

Volume 4. Peter Brger Theory of the Avant-Garde

Volume 5. Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore

Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America

Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 2nd ed., rev.

Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics

Volume 9. Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature

Volume 10. Jean-Franois Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Volume 11. Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought

Volume 12. Ross Chambers
Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction

Volume 13. Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle

Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 1939

Volume 15. Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays

Volume 16. Jacques Attali Noise

Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies

Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel
The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama

Volume 19. Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderots Genealogy of the Beholder

Volume 20. Jean-Franois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thbaud Just Gaming

Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem

Copyright 1986 by the University of Minnesota. Translation of Le Harem Colonial: Images dun sous-rotisme copyright 1981 by Editions Slatkine, Genve-Paris.

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Published by the University of Minnesota Press,
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
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Fifth printing, 1997

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alloula, Malek.
The colonial harem.
(Theory and history of literature ; v. 21)
Translation of: Le harem colonial.
Bibliography: p.
1. WomenAlgeriaSocial conditions. 2. Postal cardsAlgeria. 3. Photography of women.
4. Harem.
I. Title. II. Series.
HQ1791.5.A7613
1986
305.40965
85-16527

ISBN-978-1-452-91578-4 ISBN 0-8166-1384-2 (pbk.)

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Introduction

Djamila, a young Algerian woman, is a member of Algerias National Liberation Front (FLN). Her cosmetic bag, which she holds so awkwardly under the gaze of the French soldiers as she leaves the Arab quarter of Algiers (the Casbah, or madina ) to enter the French section (or ville nouvelle ) of the city, contains explosives destined for the milk bar in the rue dIsly. It is 1956 and the Battle of Algiers is about to begin. Djamila, like many other Arab women in her country, has assumed a role in her social order, one which not only has brought her out of seclusion in the home and into the streets but has refashioned her physical and cultural appearance. She has become a part of the Algerian revolution. Her eyes, which according to the traditional and especially Western image of the Arab woman were alone visible behind an all-concealing veil, are now large with mascara. Her face and hair are exposed. The veil is gone and has been replaced by Western clothes. The makeup, however, and the short skirt have, paradoxically, become part of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism. Whereas it was the veil that had previously taken on a symbolic significance as an assertion of tradition and custom in Algeria, it was Western apparel that early in the revolution allowed Algerian women, like Djamila, to actively confront the colonial presence in the streets. Later, toward the end of the revolution, when Western-clad Algerian women became suspect, the veil was once again assumed by the women of the FLN so that they could conceal within its folds the weapons and explosive devices they carried between the French and Arab quarters of the city. There is, according to Frantz Fanons A Dying Colonialism, his study of the Algerian revolution, a historic dynamism of the veil, which can be perceived over the course of Frances colonization of Algeria.

In the beginning, the veil was a mechanism of resistance, but its value for the social group remained very strong. The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid separation of the sexes, but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria. In a second phase, the mutation occurred in connection with the Revolution and under special circumstances. The veil was abandoned in the course of revolutionary action. What had been used to block the psychological or political offensives of the occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to meet the new problems created by the struggle.

In The Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula has collected, arranged, and annotated the picture postcards of Algerian women produced and sent by the French in Algeria during the first three decades of this century. This Algerian writers study of the postcards, which reveals an intense preoccupation with the veiled female body, engages historically in the same kind of social practice that the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu has termed challenge and riposte. Bourdieu examined this dialectic in the context of Kabylian society, a Berber population in Algeria among whom he worked and where the exchange of challenges served to maintain the tribal sense of honor. The nature of the riposte, according to Bourdieu, makes the challenge a challenge, as opposed to mere aggression. has received little systematic attention. Alloulas commentary on the postcards provides such a perspective. The perspective also displays the historical tension produced by technological disparities and the discrepancies of unequal development. A reading of the sort that I propose to undertake, Alloula writes, would be entirely superfluous if there existed photographic traces of the gaze of the colonized upon the colonizer. In their absence, that is, in the absence of a confrontation of opposed gazes, I attempt here, lagging far behind History, to return this immense postcard to its sender. (p. 5) Although the postcards in this book are from the early twentieth century, they do not represent a historically isolable phenomenon. They are part of a conflict whose consequences continue to interest contemporary global politics and which has important ramifications in the intellectual arena as well.